"He would have to be told," said the old man. I could see the top of the silk hat shaking. "And she would have to be told!"

"It is awful, sir!" she answered, wringing her hands. "But I'd never spoil it that way for anything."

"You forget the other!" he said sternly.

"Lost," she argued. "The time has gone by. It was not a human, sir. I could never mention her name--beautiful thing she is!--with that other."

"I know--I know," whispered the old man distractedly.

"Well, then, let things run their course. G.o.d will not let harm come of it."

"Blood," said he.

For a moment there was no sound. The one word seemed to have decided all questions and to have called for silence.

"In case of my death--" the Judge began after a while.

Margaret Murchie uttered a little cry.

"I have left a paper where she will find it," he finished. "I can do nothing more now. Perhaps--perhaps it will not be a crisis, after all.

I think if I had the chance again, I would send him to his doom."

With these words he raised his clenched fist and walked rapidly across the gra.s.s to the arched exit leading to the alley. The click of the latch told me that he had gone.

You may imagine my state of mind. As I endeavored in those seconds to wrest some meaning from the tangle of words I had overheard, my thoughts were tumbling over each other so fast that I had forgotten the doubtful part I had played as an eavesdropper. I had heard a reference made to me as one who had brought some new complication into the affairs of that household which heretofore I had regarded as the most spotless and quiet in the city, but which now I found had some dark and mysterious menace hanging over its peace. Was I the one, after all, to whom they had referred? They had spoken of some one else and whispered strange phrases. It was all a blank puzzle to me.

Perhaps under different circ.u.mstances my caution and dislike of all that is unusual or doubtful would have led me away from the house, planning never to return. But there is in me a certain loyalty. I do not quickly cast my lot or my reputation with that of another; when, however, I have done so, I do not quickly withdraw. Extraordinary as it may seem, I felt myself already bound to Julianna. Perhaps I already loved her desperately.

Whatever may have been the case, when I turned back into the room I looked into her gaze with an expression of solemnity which my emotions intended as an outward sign of my continued devotion.

I must have presented then a ridiculous, sentimental appearance. She laughed the moment she saw me.

"You like our balcony," she said. And then, as if she had discovered the cause of my seriousness, she added, "also our spring moonlight."

I nodded.

"It is an unusual spot for the middle of a metropolis," she went on. "It is filled with a tangle from which years ago I used to imagine fairies and gnomes and Arabian marauders might step at any moment."

"Tell me more," said I.

"There was a little basin and fountain there when I was a child. But when it did not flow, yellow slime collected at the bottom, and when the water was turned on and trickled from one basin to another, it gave forth a mournful sound that made one think of deserted villages, and moss growing on gravestones, and courtyards where there were moonlight murders."

"You have a keen imagination."

"The keenest!" she exclaimed. "Why not? It has grown up with me. And the only trouble is that it causes me the greatest restlessness. My fate is like all others. I am exactly what I would not be. Sometimes I long to enjoy all the wildest of respectable adventures."

"I should think you would keep that a secret from the Judge. He, above all, is a man of settled habits. His greatest genius has been to make romance out of the commonplace sequences of life."

She sprang up and walked to the mantel.

"That is true," she said. "I never show that side of me to him. He would not know what strange spirit moved me. I inherited none of it from him or my mother. I never show that side to anybody."

"Except to me," I said mischievously.

"Except to you," she affirmed without a smile. "But sometimes I feel like a wolf in lamb skin."

"At those times I take a brisk walk," I said.

"I do, too. I walk around the Monument nearly every afternoon at five, with father's dog. Usually at that hour he is at the club."

"Shall I recognize you then by a s.h.a.ggy, Scotch hound?" I asked.

"By all means," she said, laughing wholesomely. "I suppose in the novels they would call that a secret meeting."

In spite of the light manner in which she had spoken, she had lowered her voice a little when she heard a step in the hall. Margaret entered, as I have seen her so many, many times since, to collect the little coffee-cups.

The old servant, I felt without seeing, did not take her eyes away from me while she was in the room; so conscious was I of being the subject of her observation that I could find but few words to carry on the conversation. The very effect--that of an intimate dialogue interrupted--was produced in spite of my desire to avoid it, and when she left, Julianna had changed her mood. Finding, perhaps, that I was content to listen, she employed a delicate piece of strategy to place me in her father's lounging-chair where I could watch her as she leaned back among the pillows, and in a voice, more soothing than any I had ever heard, described to me in quaint phrases the character of six imaginary persons who might among themselves make up a world, with all the traits of personality which we find in our own. From this piquant attempt, she emerged to plunge into a light discussion of heredity.

"I can see a trace of the Judge in your belief," said I.

She admitted that he had been her teacher, that they often discussed such things. It needed no denial from Julianna, however, to know that her convictions about the power of inherited tendencies had come from her own thought. Her mind, unlike her manner, had little submissiveness, and, furthermore, she recited several cases from her own shrewd observation.

Can I attribute my entranced interest on that occasion to her brilliance? To this day I do not know. I would have been content to sit there without my pipe, without a cigarette, listening merely to the brook-like flow of her voice and looking at the play of expression upon her beautiful, sensitive face.

I could feel, I thought, the warmth of her hand still lingering in my own after I had gone down the steps, and I turned my face into the night breeze on the avenue, glad to be alive, conscious of my health, my strength, my youth and my courage, oblivious to the traditions of the Estabrooks and intoxicated with a longing for her personality the moment I had left it.

Not before the next morning did the haunting thought of something queer and strange lurking behind the Colfax home rise to cause me doubt.

"It is nonsense," I thought. "Chance events, chance words, and my own suspicious mind have united to produce an unreality. The Judge, naturally enough, is jealous of such a daughter. Who would not be under the same circ.u.mstances? An old man would be beastly lonely in that comfortable but ancient house, even if they had removed the garden fountain with its mournful trickle. The world has no such picturesque and abnormal situations as those which have come into my mind. And Julianna has all that any one could ask. Above all the vital fact is that she is no other than she!"

Perhaps for the sake of good taste I waited two days in painful restraint before I left my office to walk around the Monument at five; certainly my delay was not because I could pretend to foresee that a ghastly mystery was waiting to seize me and drag me in with its unseen tentacles.

CHAPTER II

A PLEDGE TO THE JUDGE

There is a peculiar honesty about true affection for woman. It is for the flirtations, the light and frivolous intimacies that a man smooths his hair, picks out his scarf, and purchases a new stick. Somehow it seems to me that a gentleman of natural high honor will always present his average self to the one woman. That he should be attentive is natural, that he should be affected is repellent to my notions. Perhaps it was for this reason that without preparation I closed my desk and walked up to meet Julianna, as I would have walked home to my own bachelor quarters.

She was waiting for me!

"I have been expecting you," said she, with her hand upon the dog's grizzled head, and in that frank and simple statement there was more charm than in all the false feminine reserve in the universe.

"I did not come before," I told her, "because I felt that you might believe me presuming too much."